Being a critic is a terrific method for killing your love of art

Being a critic is a terrific method for killing your love of art.

Like a fly bouncing uselessly off a closed window, I'm caught at a moment when the effort of finding new ways to perceive the world feels just out of reach for me.

Sometimes I'd like everybody who is stuck, or lost, or vacant to stay that way and keep silent for as long as it takes, but that's the critic in me talking.

Dub music is like a long echo delay, looping through time...turning the rational musical order into an ocean of sensation.

The longer we live, the more we are obliged to confront the deeper meaning of what it is we do.

I had the idea to do an anthology about instrument-making.

Logically there is nothing new to say about the New. Or maybe it's just a problem of articulating unfamiliar perceptions.

Sound: always in a state of emergence or decay

People don't have to put you in a box. You can have the confidence to move across, and combine and learn from each different practice. They inform each other.

Paul [ Burwell] and I had also got interested in making books. We'd been working with Bob Cobbing, the sound poet, since the beginning of the 70s, and Bob had this press called Writers Forum.

There is nothing wrongwith enjoying life’s luxuriesas long as your happinessisn’t contingent on them.

Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous.

This story is true. Of course, there are many lies therein and most of it did not happen, but it's all true. In that sense it is deeply religious, perhaps even biblical.

An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.

The voice, Afghan matchmakers say, is more than half of love.

Without death and decay, how could life go on?

There’s always an article coming out, saying, ‘The new thing is funny women!’

Put the strong, masculine figure in a school with tough kids and you have a certain control. It's very demeaning to the kids and very demeaning to the tough, black guy, but that's how they worked it.

In poetically well built museums, formed from the heart's compulsions, we are consoled not by finding in them old objects that we love, but by losing all sense of Time.

What we need is a critique of visual culture that is alert to the power of images for good and evil and that is capable of discriminating the variety and historical specificity of their uses.